Hecaloth

a story from the Eclipse Phase universe

News had begun to filter back from the rest of the world. Major population centers have been subject to nuclear strikes, among them London and its surroundings (probably including Bletchley Park).

TITAN headhunter drones have been encasing the heads of civilians in a sticky polymer and flying off toward the east. John Bainbridge persuades the flying squad to investigate the point out in Lake Michigan where the drones have been heading. In return, he’ll take their backups and get them offworld. They land their spy plane near the lakefront and commandeer a boat.

In the lake, they discover an immense conical spire of impaled heads. Their best guess is that it is some type of massive, water-cooled supercomputer, using the heads as processor nodes.

2107.09.25 :: 10:49:07 :: Streets of Chicago, USA

The Bletchley flying squad flees headhunter war machines and a plague of decapitated zombie soldiers with the aid of a local drug dealer and his grandmother (who gets shot and ends up having to ride along as a cortical stack concealed in the plastic Virgin Mary from her flower garden). The ride to O’hare Skyport nearly ends at the stockyards when a herd of cybernetically modified exsurgent swine pursue our plucky Brits.